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Building Excel Media Player - Part 2

In out last post, we talked about how to use Excel as a flexible development environment and touched on the benefits of using Office graphics to build your UI. This post goes into how to use ActiveX controls in Excel and how to contain and manipulate data in tables to drive your application. Using ActiveX Controls […]

In out last post, we talked about how to use Excel as a flexible development environment and touched on the benefits of using Office graphics to build your UI. This post goes into how to use ActiveX controls in Excel and how to contain and manipulate data in tables to drive your application.

Using ActiveX Controls

First we need to enable that hidden Developer Tab, Click Office Button, Excel Options and Toggle 'Show Developer tab in the Ribbon' on.

Now click Developer Tab, Insert, on the bottom right corner is a 'More Controls' option. Here you will find a large variety of controls from File Browsers to Calendar controls, buttons, Internet Explorer; you can even register your own custom controls for using in Excel.

We require music, let's search for Windows Media Player and draw it on the grid. This provides us with full media player functionality as well as access to its object model in VBA. The full Media Player functionality is out of scope but you can learn more by looking at the reference here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb248315(VS.85).aspx, but we are going to briefly talk about tying our custom UI to control to it.

Let's use the Play button as an example: Right click on the your 'play' button and click 'Assign Macro'. Since I named my play button 'Play' the default name is perfect 'Play_Click', click new. This will open VBA which you can access at any time by pressing Alt + F11.

To begin using our control let's start simply by accessing pressing play by adding the following to your Play_Click method.

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Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.